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by Mira Grant

  He looked at the guard and said, “There were no lights. How do I know what the test said if there were no lights?”

  “How do you know what the test said when there were lights?” asked the guard. “They’re a psychological crutch. Their presence changes nothing.”

  “There were no lights,” insisted the man doggedly.

  I was close enough that I’d be hit by the splatter if they shot him where he stood. To make it this far and then die like that wouldn’t just be silly: It would be stupid, and wasteful. “Doesn’t anyone have a testing unit with lights on it?” I asked. “Give the man a little peace of mind before you do whatever’s to be done.”

  “False positives happen,” chimed another Irwin. “If he wants a second test, give him a second test.”

  I didn’t think they were going to go for it. They had all the power, and all the weapons; we didn’t even have clothes. But we had press passes, and we had cameras that were still running, even if they were piled in a heap, awaiting decontamination. The officer turned, motioning toward one of the people who were providing cover. The second officer reached into their pocket, produced a more common testing unit, and lobbed it over.

  Silently, the officer broke the seal on the unit and offered it to the Irwin who’d asked for it. He pressed his thumb down on the pad. Lights sprang into life atop the unit, flashing red green, red yellow, red red red, and finally settling on a steady, bloody glow.

  The Irwin closed his eyes. “Damn,” he said, in a small voice. When he opened them again he was smiling wryly. “That’s the trouble with Alabama, I guess. I thought it was mud when it hit my cheek. I guess it wasn’t. I’ll go outside now, if you’ll let me.”

  “I’ll escort you,” said the officer. Her voice was female, and her tone was almost sympathetic.

  The other officers stood aside as she walked him to the open door and then out, into the courtyard. The door swung shut behind them. There was a momentary silence. Then three gunshots rang out, only slightly muffled by the closed door.

  “And then there were six,” said Jody’s living sniper tower.

  I looked toward him. “You’re Eric, aren’t you?”

  “I’m surprised you remembered,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Think we’ve met before.”

  “I’d remember,” he said.

  “You’re all clean,” said Amber. To illustrate her point, she reached up and removed her helmet. John did the same. The other security officers did not. I wasn’t sure whether that made our people brave or stupid. Amber continued, “Your clothing will need to be destroyed, but replacements will be provided.”

  “What about our equipment?” asked a woman.

  “If it can be sterilized, it will be. If it can’t be sterilized, hopefully your insurance will cover replacement costs. I hate to be the one to say this, but the convention center wants me to remind you all that you signed waivers before going outside, and they are not liable for any damage to yourself or your possessions.” Amber grimaced. “They were shouting the legalese after me as I was running for the door to save your bacon, so I’m pretty sure they mean it.”

  “Who’s handling the exterior cleanup?” I asked abruptly. Everyone turned to look at me, some of them disbelieving, others amused. I shook my head. “I’m not volunteering, and I’m not looking to cover myself with glory, or with anything else. I want a hot shower and a big glass of whiskey right about now. But those zombies were fresh, and there were buckets of them. You don’t get mobs like that without an attack, and we’d have heard if there’d been something this close to the convention center. Especially right now, with half the eyes of the country locked on the place.”

  “You think this was another setup,” said Amber, slow realization dawning ugly on her face.

  I nodded. “I do. Some of those folks looked like they were wearing name tags. Might make it easy on us, when it comes to finding out where they all came from. Maybe one of the delegations lost a bus and didn’t bother to tell us.”

  John and Amber exchanged a look. “I’ll see what we can do,” said John. He didn’t sound very confident, and that was fine by me, because I didn’t actually expect him to accomplish anything.

  The Kellis-Amberlee virus switches from its passive helper state to its destructive active state as soon as the blood it lives in leaves the body. Most people are resistant to the virus in their own blood, hence children not amplifying over bloody noses and women not amplifying over menstruation; if it were easy for us to trigger amplification in ourselves, the human race would’ve ended the first time a woman who’d been exposed to the virus gave birth. We’re all infected, sure, but the virus was man-made, and a small handful of the safeguards designed in the original labs are still in place. Thank God for that.

  The trouble was, no one is that resistant to anyone else. Even identical twins react to the antibodies formed by each other’s blood. Every one of those bodies out in the woods represented a huge risk to anyone who tried to study them. A single drop of their blood could spell the end of everything. That’s why forensic science, which was huge before the Rising—big enough to be the basis of several long-running television franchises—is all but defunct today. No one wants to handle the dead. Fire and bleach are the solutions, not mass spectrometers and careful slides.

  Someone had set those zombies on us. I was sure of it, all the way down to my bones. Things like that didn’t just happen, especially not to large groups of trained and heavily armed Irwins. Someone had been trying to throw the convention into disarray, maybe give it a nice framing tragedy to keep attention on the body count and away from whatever it was that was really going on behind the scenes. Whoever it was wasn’t going to want anyone getting a better look at the bodies. If I played it up like we needed a closer look to learn anything at all, maybe they wouldn’t think to ask themselves about all that footage we’d been taking while we were running through the woods.

  Our team’s drone-mounted cameras were good at picking up and magnifying small details. I knew my personal cameras had been running and uploading the whole time. There was plenty of data, as long as no one thought to seek out and destroy it all before I had finished decontamination and rejoined my team.

  “Now that the six of you have been checked out, if you’d please proceed along the tunnel to the first door,” said Amber, clapping her hands together. “A decontamination suite is on the other side, and there are enough shower stalls for all of you.”

  “Our equipment?” I asked.

  “As I said, it will be decontaminated and delivered to you, if possible. If something is unmarked, it will be given to the convention center office. You should be able to pick it up in about six hours.”

  “All my footage had better be present and unaltered, or you’ll be talking to my lawyer,” said Jody, suddenly sweet as pie and smiling brightly. “I did read the full contract with the convention center, and it said nothing about erasing or deleting footage. That’s a solid-state Samsung wrist-mounted recorder. It can stand decontamination procedures up to and including those required to exit an L5 lab. There’s nothing that should be done to it here that would compromise the footage, so if something does, I’ll know it was intentional. All clear?”

  “Are all Irwins this prickly, or is it just your friends, Ash?” asked Amber.

  “It’s all of us,” I said. “Answer her question.”

  “Whee,” said Amber, deadpan. “Yes, ma’am, we’re all clear, and believe me, I have no intention of altering anyone’s footage. Also, I’m not the one in charge of the equipment decontamination, so while it’s swell that you’re making yourself clear, you’re not doing yourself any good by being clear to me. Thankfully, I’m also not the person you’d be suing, so I don’t feel too terribly worried. If you’d all move, please, we can get this show on the road, and we can get you back in decent clothes before your teammates beat down the doors demanding to know what’s going on.”

  The names of the dead would a
lready have been released, of course; there was no reason to keep those quiet, since once someone amplified, they no longer had any right to either privacy or fair treatment under the law. Zombies weren’t human anymore: They were less than corpses, afforded none of the protections once reserved against desecration of the dead. We all knew that. We also knew that our friends, teammates, and loved ones would be clawing at the walls for information, since we weren’t transmitting anymore, and our names were not yet listed on the roll call of the dead. We moved.

  I kept my steps slow and measured, avoiding the front of the pack, and gradually worked my way toward the back. When I reached the rear I matched pace with the man just in front of me, and said, in a conversational tone, “How much trouble do you reckon I’m in right about now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Amber. “What’s your scale?”

  “Oh, mild shouting all the way up to divorce and deportation.”

  “Can you be deported now that you’re a citizen?”

  “I’m sure Ben could find a way to have me booted from the country, if he was mad enough. Might involve claiming we were never married in the first place, I suppose.” Which technically, we hadn’t been. Despite efforts by the asexual and aromantic communities to have the “consummation” requirements removed from the definition of marriage in most states, there were still a lot of places where never having had sex could be taken as grounds for an annulment. I loved Ben like a brother. I’d never gone to his bed, and I was never intending to. Our relationship wasn’t like that.

  “Then you’re somewhere in the middle,” said Amber. “Everyone’s intending to yell at you, no one’s planning to have you kicked out of the country, at least so far as I know. I’ve been wrong before.”

  “Very reassuring, thanks,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m part of the ‘everyone,’” said Amber cheerfully. “I should be slamming back mimosas and cheering for my continued employment right about now, not watching your freckled ass march toward the showers.”

  “Which we are also required to take,” said John. “Since we had to go through the same biohazardous wasteland as the rest of you in order to rescue you from the zombie menace. I was looking forward to a day without bleach.”

  “A day without bleach is like a summer without sunshine,” I said.

  One of the other Irwins looked back over his shoulder, laughing. “Amen to that.”

  We were still laughing when we reached the end of the maintenance tunnel. Plastic sheeting had been spread across the space, sliced into dangling ribbons to allow us all to pass. Three more guards in hazmat suits waited there, each holding a clipboard. They were calling names and forming us into lines, positioning us in front of the openings that would presumably lead to decontamination. There didn’t seem to be any effort to separate us by gender or genitalia, which was nice: It was always good to have decontamination parties that didn’t induce dysphoria in the guests.

  I wound up in a line with both Jody and Amber, while John and the human sniper platform were in the next line over. I looked at Amber and grimaced, saying, “Joking aside, I’m sorry about the decontamination. And the mimosas. I could do with a good strong drink right about now.”

  “Alcohol later, decontamination now,” said Amber, and passed through the dangling plastic ribbons. I followed her.

  I’d been expecting a standard field decon setup—a chemical shower, a bunch of bleach, maybe some scowling men with guns to make sure we stayed behind the lines until we’d sloughed off the top three layers of our skin. There was a fine line between “clean enough for the people who set the safety standards” and “so clean that your skin began weeping blood,” which would take you back over the line into biohazardous. Most of us had been experts at walking that line long before we got our licenses.

  Instead, we were walking into what looked like the most luxurious gym bathroom I’d ever seen. Individual Isolette stalls studded the wall; two of them were already engaged, the lights above them burning a pleasant blue to indicate that they were unavailable. A pile of fluffy towels wrapped in plastic waited at the center of the room, along with an assortment of scent tabs. There was even a smiling attendant, dressed entirely in white, her hair bleached to a brittle platinum that looked like it would snap off at the lightest of touches. She held up a towel, offering it to me as Amber moved off to one side and began to strip, dropping each piece of her armor into the waiting bins.

  “Hello, and welcome to the Huntsville Convention Center,” said the attendant. “We’re so very sorry that you’ve been exposed to a biohazard. Please, pick your preferred scent profile and drop the tab into your shower as you enter. Your shampoo and body wash selections will be set to match.”

  “That’s right kind of you,” I said bemusedly, taking a towel. The plastic crinkled under my fingers. I wondered whether there was a way to come back through here with a camera running. This was one of the more surreal things I’d encountered in the process of decontamination. “D’you have something in the fresh grass or clean cotton families?”

  “Oh, yes, absolutely,” said the attendant, and positively beamed. Apparently, asking her for additional help was a good thing. “Select the all-white tablet for clean cotton. Select the green tablet with white spots for fresh grass and sunlight. Either will provide you with a pleasant, immersive cleaning experience that should wash away any unpleasant memories.”

  I hesitated in the act of reaching for a green tablet, giving her a wary, narrow-eyed look. “There aren’t drugs in these, are there? I’ve got work to do, and I’ve no interest in being given temporary amnesia by a shampoo bowl.”

  The attendant’s smile didn’t waver. “Psychotropic drugs in shower products are extremely complicated, and can be delivered via spray only. They must be approved ahead of time by the event which you are attending. Currently, we have been cleared for THC and mild anxiolytics only. Neither is present in the tablets you have requested.” She might be smiling, but the skin around her eyes was tight, betraying her discomfort. She didn’t like being this close to me when I’d just come from a hazard zone. She’d been watching me and just me since I approached her. I could still see the tiny movements in the muscles of her eyes as she struggled not to look at Amber, who was also in the room, and hence potentially also a danger.

  Tormenting the minimum-wage employees is never fair, no matter how cranky I might be feeling. “Fresh grass is fine, then,” I said, grabbing one of the green tabs. “Thanks for all your help.”

  “Service is a delight,” she said. “Thank you for your patronage.” Her smile was starting to look frayed around the edges. I headed for the nearest shower stall, dropping my green tab into the slot outside. The door opened, and I stepped inside.

  The shower stall was small and pristine. A chute was open on one wall, waiting for my towel, which had apparently been intended only to cover my nakedness until I got inside. That made sense: The point of this shower was to boil the possible infection off of me. Letting me rub a towel I had touched before I was properly clean all over my body wasn’t going to help with that process. I dropped the towel inside. A metal door slammed down with so much force that it would probably have taken off a finger if I had tried to put my hand inside. I jumped.

  The shower lights came on. “Welcome, attendee,” said the pleasant voice of the bathroom. It sounded just like the attendant outside. I was suddenly very, very glad that I had been watching her eyes closely enough to see her twitching. I didn’t need to be spinning myself horror stories about robot civil servants, thanks terribly.

  “Hello, shower,” I said.

  “I have accessed your medical records, and have determined your ideal temperature range. Do you have any injuries I should be aware of?”

  Not on the outside. I was one of the lucky ones: I’d run through hell and come out without so much as a scratch. I’d be hearing the screams for weeks, echoing in my ears every time I let my focus drift, but my body was in fine condition. “No,” I said.
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br />   “Excellent,” said the shower. “Commencing cleansing cycle.”

  The water came on, pouring not just from the showerhead in front of me, which would have been too mundane, and offered too much chance that part of me could go undrenched. Instead, it came from the entire ceiling, crashing down like the wrath of an angry god and soaking me through in an instant. I squeaked, too surprised to do anything else. That was when the water rose up from the floor, hitting my undercarriage with just as much force, and I full-out shrieked. My ego was salved a bit when an answering shriek came from the next stall over. Amber had also met the incredible wall of water.

  The floor stopped shooting high-powered jets at me after only a few seconds, and the voice said pleasantly, “Bleach cycle beginning in five seconds. Please close your eyes and mouth. Please stand with your legs together. Please understand that the management is not responsible for any damage to your person caused by failure to heed these instructions. Please try not to breathe.”

  The announcement ended just as the water from above was replaced by a dilute bleach solution—not dilute enough for my tastes, since studies had shown that most commercial bleach balances included substantially more bleach than was needed, and the stuff was murder on my hair. We’d all be blonde if the people who set the safety standards had anything to say about it, and then bald shortly after. The folks who’d bleached every last hair off of our heads would just shrug and open a wig factory if we complained. It was about profit margins as much as it was about safety, and oh, how the money rolled in.

  I kept my mouth shut tight and my eyes shut tighter, counting down the seconds until the bleach was replaced with a citrus-scented rain that stung when it hit my skin, but would help to counteract the damage. There would be lotion on the other side of the shower to offer more intensive repair. Every Irwin I’d ever met had been soft and supple, and smelled faintly of lemons.

  “Beginning bathing cycle,” said the shower. The ceiling switched off. The showerhead switched on. I opened my eyes to see three pumps extrude from the wall, helpfully labeled “shampoo,” “conditioner,” and “body wash.” A washcloth was hanging from the body wash handle. It was small, and white, and very, very new. It would probably be burnt after I used it. That was the way of the world: as disposable as possible, because only the very newest things were guaranteed to be as clean as people wanted them to be. You could boil a stone forever, and never get it all the way back to the condition it was in when it began.